The Brotherhood of Moderators.

[Geordnet]

EDIT: I've scrapped this idea, and come up with a new one (see post 5 or so, below)

I've been wanting to do some DMing, and so I was thinking "What to do to keep the lovely, hand-crafted work of art that is my world from being utterly destroyed if all goes to hell in a handbasket? (Litterally!)

I came up with this: have something like a 30th level wizard/10th level archmage/10th level planewalker, or perhaps even a brotherhood of such individuals, come and set things right. Solely interested in the preservation of entire worlds as viable places for lower level characters to exist, he/they would preform actions such as removing metagaming parties to less fragile campain worlds, shunting off TPKs in world-crisis situations to divergent dimentions, to freezing an entire plane in stasis until a plane-hopping intervention party can be brought in.

I don't know much about epic-level characters myself, so I want the best epic planehoppers you guys can dream up of to fill the honor roll -if anyone has a character that he actually brought up to level 50+ who would fit the bill, they can be the masters of the order! :smallbiggrin:

[Eldan]

Well, the Moderators of Mechanus and the Inevitables already fill that kind of role...

Though really. Metagaming is usually an out of character problem, and trying to solve it in character only leads to a petty arms race and, in the end, bad blood at the table. Talk about it out of game, if it's a problem.

[Savannah]

I've been wanting to do some DMing, and so I was thinking "What to do to keep the lovely, hand-crafted work of art that is my world from being utterly destroyed if all goes to hell in a handbasket? (Litterally!)

Don't. Really. Let the players mess it up beyond recognition, as long as they're having fun. I think one of the most frustrating things for a player is to have the DM so attached to something in their world (be it a storyline, an NPC, or the world itself) that they cannot stand the players doing something unexpected that inadvertently harms that thing. And I think one of the hardest things for a DM to do is to come up with their creation of the world or storyline and then to let it go. Let the players ruin the world. Let them come up with a brilliant plan that negates part of your story. It's more important that they are having fun than that your creation is left untouched. (Yes, it's important that you have fun, too, but if you're so attached to your world that you stop the players from being able to do what they want, you're probably better off worldbuilding and writing stories on your own than trying to DM.)

And if you're worried about being able to run more than one campaign in the world, don't forget that you can always make the later campaigns earlier chronologically or set them in a different part of the world. Heck, you can set them in a parallel dimension, if you want to!


Solely interested in the preservation of entire worlds as viable places for lower level characters to exist, he/they would preform actions such as removing metagaming parties to less fragile campain worlds, shunting off TPKs in world-crisis situations to divergent dimentions, to freezing an entire plane in stasis until a plane-hopping intervention party can be brought in.

This implies a great deal of 4th-wall breaking in the campaign. Personally, I find that that increases, rather than decreases, the chances of the players deliberately doing something to mess everything up. If you know you're in a game, then what's the point of going along quietly? Now, if this is the type of campaign you want to run, that's one thing. But you should consider that carefully before you plan to do so. There are other solutions to metagaming and TPKs.

[Welknair]

If you have a team of Epic Level characters implemented soley for the purpose of saving your campaign world from either A) The deaths of your PCs or B) Your PCs, it'll leave your players feeling cheated. Without the risk of actual death, things get much less dramatic and without the possibility to go on a rampage, players simply get resentful.

Sorry, but I don't think this would be a terribly good idea.

[Geordnet]

No, I think you're right: it'd be a terrible idea...

...unless they were the players themselves!
I just realized that while this would make for a horrible plot device, it would make for a really nice epic-level adventure or two, maybe even a campain if done right. (The world-saving part, not the messing with the players part.)

Stopping a disaster before it ever happens makes for nice time-travel type plots, and most of the work in terms of world history, background, and plots have been made already. The ex-PCs would become NPCs, and you already know what decisions they're going to make ahead of time. The only hard part is figuring out what they'll do once history veers from its original path.

There's no shortage of dead worlds to go around, and why wouldn't the party want to save a world just because it wasn't theirs? In fact, a DM with a good memory can make it all the more personal by giving his group this chance to fix mistakes they made years ago...

[Welknair]

Sounds cool. Sounds like D&D Doctor Who. :smallbiggrin:

[Geordnet]

Yeah, and I can still keep the brotherhood as the quest-gives; that actually fits in the original charter of creating alternate realities and bringing in outside intervention teams.

PS: on a related note, has anyone had thier group been extra-planarly contacted by another gaming group to come help them when things have really gone bad?

[Savannah]

PS: on a related note, has anyone had thier group been extra-planarly contacted by another gaming group to come help them when things have really gone bad?

No. And I wouldn't want to. I like to solve my own problems or die trying, thank you. (In games, of course, not real life :smallwink:)

[Geordnet]

So then, should I post something up in the play-by-post section of the forum? Because this really is the sort of thing that should be done by the community as a continuous series, with a lineup of worlds to save and people plane shifting in thier high level adventurers for a few sessions, then returning to thier own campain worlds when they get bored.


I guess I could run it myself, although I've never run a high-level game before.

However... 90% of the plot would be written already, and I've got the entire community to help me out if I get stuck.

Ok, that settles it: I'm going for it. I need a dead world that could have been saved by a party of 10-15th level adventurers in the right place and at the right time (epic level worldsaving is for later!) with enough notes to be able to roleplay the NPCs, (aka Nolonger Player Characters) and a few players with inactive characters at that level who want to see what a modern military-style operation set in a fantasy world(s) feels like to take part in.

Oh, and I'll probably need someone to tell me how play-by-post goes too.